Another 1945?
Steve Richards (The Guardian, 28 July) is right to say (and Ed Miliband obviously agrees with him) that next year’s election will not, and should not, be decided by personality politics. So what is it that will determine the voters’ preferences?
It would be nice to think, as Richards argues, that the election will be about ideas. But policy ideas, until and unless they are successfully proved in practice, make little impact on voters increasingly cynical about promises.
What might matter, however, is something even less tangible. The evidence suggests that every now and again, for no apparent reason, the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, can change. It may be that we are at just such a juncture – and not before time.
We have now given an extended trial to the values espoused by the proponents of the “free” market and the aggressive pursuit of individual self-interest. It is becoming increasingly clear that those values are not those of our great humane and liberal tradition; they are instead those of “dog eat dog”, “devil take the hindmost”, “look after number one”, “winner takes all” and any other of those phrases that have been traditionally used to describe with contempt and distaste the sentiments of selfishness and greed.
It is, as Thomas Piketty demonstrates, always the case that powerful people, given the chance (and nothing is better guaranteed to offer that chance than the unrestrained market), to grab what they can, and then to entrench and protect their advantage, so that they can extend it still further.
We may now have reached the point, however, when the question is increasingly being asked – why do the rest of us allow that to happen? Wasn’t that supposed to be the role of democracy, to ensure that the political power of elected governments would ensure that the virtues of inclusivity, social cohesion, and equal rights, would offset the otherwise overwhelming power of those who would dominate the marketplace?
It may be that, just as in 1945 (another crucial turning-point), the forthcoming election will be about values, rather than personalities, or even policies. And the good news is that the values that we have been in danger of losing have not disappeared; they are still present in the hearts and minds of most citizens. Most people in Britain will affirm, if asked, their continued support for fairness, compassion, tolerance, concern for others. Those values have become submerged under the tidal wave of free-market propaganda, but the 2015 election may see them again rise to the surface.
Most voters do not think about politics or economics in any systematic way. It is only a small minority, whatever their position on the spectrum of political views, that has developed a fully coherent set of beliefs and principles. The majority are perfectly capable of holding in their minds quite contradictory notions and allegiances. What matters, what determines the way they will vote, is which of those contradictory values is closest to the surface, or in other words has the greatest salience, at any particular time.
Over more than three decades, those who have hijacked our democracy have discovered the means by which they can raise the salience in the popular mind of values that suit their interests. They have become expert at “tweaking” particular issues – outrage at social security “scroungers”, perhaps, or concern about the supposed threat to jobs or housing posed by immigrants, or fear of an allegedly threatened tax increase. They have learned to practise what the Australians have called “dog whistle” politics – the appeal to sentiments which they dare not encourage openly and which voters would be ashamed to admit to but which will nevertheless decide voting intentions.
The control exercised by the powerful through their ownership of most media outlets gives them a great advantage in such efforts. But they are also able to exploit a natural human predilection which means that the values of self-interest and self-preservation, at least in the heat of any particular moment, will often take precedence over more socially aware and responsible attitudes. The default position for most people – especially in hard times – will quite naturally give a high priority to looking after the interests of their own nearest and dearest.
But experience is a great teacher. When decline and social disjunction are seared over decades into the national consciousness, when hope and confidence are at a low ebb, and when the outlook is more of the same, it is not surprising that the guiding principles of the last three decades might be called into question. It is then that hearts rather than minds help to frame the compelling argument that we would all be better and stronger if we could all rely on the same degree of help and support as we are ready to offer to our own closest family and friends.
In 1945, the British people rejected a great war hero in favour of one of the least charismatic leaders in our history. Clement Attlee won a landslide victory and went on to head the most successful and effective reforming government of modern times. Ed Miliband may know – and intuitively feel – more than we think.
Bryan Gould
28 July 2015
Growing Inequality Can Be Seen As Clever Politics
Voter turnout has been falling steadily across the western world in recent decades, and not least in New Zealand. We have a proud record of high turnouts in general elections, but even here, we dipped below 80% in 2008 and fell further to a post-war low of 74.21% in 2011.
The problem is even more acute with young voters; opinion polls show a growing number of those under 25 with no interest in voting. And turnout at local elections is much lower again.
These figures are of real concern to the older generation who still retain a folk memory of what things were like before we achieved democracy and of the sacrifices our forbears made to do so. They are also a puzzle to politicians and activists who have difficulty in understanding that, to many people, politics is a sideshow that impinges on their lives only briefly – and even then, not very much – at election time.
Short of following the Australian example by making voting compulsory, it is, though, hard to know what could be done to improve matters. We know very little about what makes people not only vote but vote the way they do – thankfully it may be thought, since if we knew more, even more would be spent on trying to sell them personalities and policies as though they were products on the supermarket shelf.
What we do know is, not surprisingly, that people’s views and motivations vary greatly. Some are entirely settled in their preferences, others change their minds according to their perceptions at the time, while yet others make a random choice on the day or do not vote at all.
It is no doubt broadly the case that the electorate comprises two groups of voters with consistent voting intentions at either end of the political spectrum, and in the middle, perhaps an even larger group of undecideds, swing voters and those who do not vote at all.
I don’t think I am revealing any secrets of the polling booth when I recall that my own dear parents, and most of their respective families, voted National all their lives. For them, it required no actual decision; it was just what we – and “people like us” did. It was rather like being a lifelong supporter of, say, Manchester United.
For many voters, in other words, voting – particularly in a broadly right-wing direction – is often seen as a badge of identity, of respectability and difference. It means being part of the successful people in society, those who are a cut above the common herd.
Even if the facts of the voter’s situation may not actually bear that out, to vote in that direction is to express an aspiration that it should be so. And as so often, it is not just a matter of making common cause with the better off but with establishing an identity clearly differentiated from that of the less successful.
There is also, of course, the belief that the “top” people know what they are doing and that the country can safely be entrusted to them. People who have had success in their own lives, particularly in financial terms, are thought to be best suited to run the country – though whether the kind of self-interest that produces personal fortunes is evidence of the breadth of vision needed to run the country is a question rarely asked.
At the other end of the political spectrum, there is an equally committed group of voters who, either as a matter of self-interest or of social conscience, vote in solidarity with those who are struggling and who want to see the power of a democratic government used to offset the economic power of those who would otherwise dominate the marketplace.
It is the composition of this group that is of most interest in terms of explaining falling voter turnout. It is a reasonable interpretation of the opinion polling figures that significant numbers of those who might once have voted in the hope of a government that would give them a better deal have now migrated to the group that despairs of or has no interest in politics and who do not, therefore, show up in the polls.
These are the people – found disproportionately amongst the poorly educated, the badly housed, the ethnic minorities, the unemployed, those in poor health – who have concluded that “the system” has nothing to offer them. Many of them are on benefits or low incomes, and are in debt, with no foreseeable means of improving their situations. As my former colleague in the House of Commons, Tony Benn, once said, “people without hope do not vote”.
The electoral message is clear but unwelcome. A government that puts the interests of the well-off first can relax. As a significant proportion of the population becomes increasingly voiceless and invisible – in other words, devoid of hope – their absence from the polling booths on election day means they can safely be ignored.
Growing inequality can be seen, in other words, as clever politics. It allows a government that is so inclined to deliver to its supporters, but discourages the losers to such an extent that they are in effect disenfranchised.
Bryan Gould
21 July 2014
An Impartial Press?
The leader of the British Labour Party, Ed Miliband, is undoubtedly competent, and he enjoys the support of his party, but his poll ratings are abysmal – and that is welcome relief to a Conservative-led Coalition government, whose performance in office has been less than stellar and for whom Ed Miliband’s troubles are the only thing going for them.
The overwhelmingly right-wing British press has played a significant role in this scenario. They lose no opportunity to show the Labour leader in a poor light, as witness the media frenzy when Miliband was filmed making a mess of a bacon sandwich during a television interview.
A bacon sandwich? A minor affront to good manners or good taste, you might think, but hardly a hanging offence. But the press knew what they were doing. The episode offered a chance to reinforce an image of incompetence – and a politician, particularly one of Jewish origins, eating a bacon sandwich would offend significant numbers of voters from different religious groupings.
In New Zealand, the episode may occasion a wry smile; we all know that the British press is notoriously biased. Our own press may have their own allegiances but they manage to maintain (don’t they?) a reasonable degree of impartiality in their political reporting.
Which is why there are some disturbing features about the press treatment of the supposed “scandal” (as it is regularly referred to) of Donghua Liu and David Cunliffe. There can be no doubt that this supposed saga was deliberately designed by National Party strategists to do the maximum damage to the Labour leader, and that the bullets they fashioned were duly fired, as they knew they would be, by the national media.
Let us rehearse how the saga developed. A perfectly appropriate letter written by David Cunliffe on behalf of a constituent in 2003 was discovered by National’s Immigration Minister a month or two ago. It was then held back until after David Cunliffe had been lured into denying that he had ever advocated for Donghua Liu – something he had no reason to remember and which a search of his records had failed to reveal. The letter was then released with the intention of showing that Cunliffe, in making that denial, was either a liar or a fool.
That same Donghua Liu then alleged that he had donated over $100,000 to the Labour Party; that allegation had been signalled in advance by the Prime Minister from New York. “There is more to come – wait and see,” he said, and in doing so revealed that he knew that the allegation – true or otherwise – was coming and that he was confident that it would be headlined by the media, as it duly was.
The allegation has, of course, crumbled following proper investigation. But, another day, another headline – this time the shocking revelation that Donghua Liu had given $2000 in 2007 to a Hawkes Bay rowing club whose members included the daughters of a Labour politician.
How is it that this minor gift, an unsubstantiated allegation made by a convicted criminal, and an innocent letter written by a constituency MP doing his job, were magnified to dominate the political agenda for so long? How did the Prime Minister know in advance that a story that had little or no substance would be so useful in damaging the Labour party and in diverting attention from the much more significant story of Maurice Williamson’s , Judith Collins’, and his own links with various Chinese businessmen?
And how can the media as a whole be proud of their role? Is this what is meant by and is to be expected from an even-handed treatment of the political debate? Or does it show that our press is prepared to offer its services to one side of that debate, by giving maximum coverage to a story deliberately engineered to show the other side in a bad light?
The defence offered will always be that a free press must be allowed to make its own judgments of the newsworthiness of particular stories and that there are other outlets that take a different and equally partisan approach. But can we be happy when supposedly responsible journalists so deliberately use their privileged access to our most important news outlets to shape the news, thereby serving the interests of just one party and reflecting the political preferences both of themselves and of the major corporations that own the papers they work for?
And, on the day when the Herald prominently promotes the carefully-timed, pre-election hagiography of John Key written by one of its senior leader-writers and political journalists, we are surely entitled to ask, how close is the nexus between that paper and the National Party? Is our press really so different when it comes to the political treatment of bacon sandwiches?
Bryan Gould
24 June 2014
Is Democracy Too Left-Wing?
There is never any shortage of advice to political parties who seek to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy that to do so would be to court electoral disaster. Any indication of a wish to move away from the status quo will, they are told, be seen as a dangerous “move to the left”.
It was Mrs Thatcher who assured voters that “there is no alternative” and we see in New Zealand today the same insistence that the current orthodoxy is the only option. Yet if they accepted the advice they are given, parties who want to offer an alternative set of policies could no longer do so, but would be reduced to gesture politics and smiling sweetly.
The democratic process would thereby be denied its real purpose and – in the absence of an effective challenge through the ballot box – the grip on power of already dominant interests will be further strengthened.
It is, after all, only through the democratic process that the powerful can be restrained. All societies inevitably demonstrate that power, left unchallenged, will concentrate increasingly in a few hands. That power will be used to entrench the position of those who hold it, to protect it from challenge and to increase their advantage over their fellow-citizens.
The whole point of democracy was to enable the political power and democratic legitimacy of an elected government to offset and protect ordinary people against the otherwise overwhelming economic power of those who dominate the so-called “free market”.
That inevitable tendency towards the ever-increasing concentration of power has been graphically confirmed in an important book recently published but the French economist Thomas Piketty. He analyses data over a period of more than two centuries to show that, with one brief exception, economic power has increasingly passed to a few at the expense of the many.
The exception is significant. In the two or three decades after the Second World War, power moved back to ordinary people and away from the powerful; this reflected the determination of ordinary people whose efforts had won the war to ensure that there was no return to the “bad old days” that had produced war and Depression.
They used the power of democratic government to strike a better balance between the rich and powerful on the one hand and ordinary people on the other. If they were told – even by Winston Churchill – that this would mean a dangerous “move to the left”, they paid him no attention.
Since that time, however, the rich and powerful have found ways to reclaim, and now increase, their advantages, and to restore the normal condition of widening inequality in our society; indeed, Piketty predicts that that process is gathering pace. And there is no message more congenial to the powerful than that this is how it has to be.
Yet we can do something about it, if we have the courage to use the power that our forefathers who fought for democracy have bequeathed us. The whole point of democracy is that it allows us to challenge existing power structures – and that challenge is not automatically “left-wing”.
Is the Labour Party’s proposal to use a universal savings scheme as an alternative to ever-rising interest rates left-wing? Or is it just a sensible and better alternative to a failing policy? Is the Greens’ proposal for a carbon tax left-wing? Or will it do the job of reducing climate change more effectively and provide a tax-break for ordinary people into the bargain? Is the refusal to accept that businessmen always know best left-wing or just a re-assertion of the democratic principle?
We should take heart from the fact that most New Zealanders will affirm, if asked, their continued belief in the values of fairness, compassion, tolerance, concern for others. But those values have become submerged under the tidal wave of “free-market” propaganda; democratic politicians need to find effective ways of bringing them back to the surface and to a central position in our lives.
Most people do not think about politics in any systematic way; they are perfectly capable of nodding in agreement to contradictory propositions offered from every part of the political spectrum. What determines the way they vote is which of those contradictory values is closest to the tops of their minds on polling day.
The rich and powerful are expert at using their dominance of the media to raise the salience in the popular mind of values that suit their interests. The task facing politicians who want to resist the further concentration of power is to remind New Zealand voters at every opportunity of the values they continue to hold – values that built this country and that continue to define a healthy and integrated society.
The advice that this should not be attempted for fear of seeming “left-wing” could hardly be more suited to serve the interests who have everything to gain from protecting the status quo. If our democracy is to prosper, we must remember what it is for – to resist the concentration of power and to ensure that the interests of the great majority are properly taken into account.
Bryan Gould
5 June 2014
This article was published in the NZ Herald on 10 June 2014
Who Owns the Future?
There is no novelty is arguing, as George Osborne does, that there is no alternative to his destructive and divisive policies of austerity – TINA was, after all, the Thatcherite catch-cry and as misleading in her day as it is today.
But it is surely stretching credulity too far to suggest, as John Harris does in yesterday’s Guardian, that the Tories, in making that claim, have also established their ownership of the future.
His sub-editors may have done him no favours with their headline, but let us be quite clear – George Osborne’s backward-looking reconstruction of a 1930s classical response to recession is not only discredited by history but has created a present in which living standards have fallen by a record margin, output has yet to return to pre-2008 levels, and poverty as a result is endemic and growing in many parts of our society.
The future to which George Osborne lays claim is one which many of his intellectual fellow-travellers, including the IMF, are quietly abandoning. It is a future of government cuts without end, of growing inequality, and of a Britain – with only 10% of our output accounted for by manufacturing – finding it increasingly difficult to pay our way in the world.
If that is the future that George Osborne now owns, he is welcome to it. Most people, given the chance, would choose something different. But John Harris is on stronger ground when he argues that Labour and the left more generally have so far not offered them that option.
Most people, probably a comfortable majority, would still sign up to many of the virtues of the kind of society that Labour propounds – one in which there is a fairer distribution of wealth and a greater concern for all our citizens. Quite apart from the obvious benefits – that people would feel less pressured and divided, that there would be fewer social ills of the kind that always accompany poverty and alienation, that we would feel the benefits of living in an integrated society more at ease with itself – there is every reason to believe that a more equal and caring society would produce economic advantages as well.
The statistical evidence shows, after all, that countries with lower levels of inequality – such as the Scandinavian countries and Germany – have performed better than those countries, such as the UK and the US, where high and widening levels of inequality have accompanied relatively poor economic performance over recent decades.
This compelling evidence should come as no surprise. A wide gap between rich and poor in an economy is inimical to economic success for reasons that apply at both ends of the scale.
If wealth is concentrated in a few hands at the top end of the scale, the result is significant economic inefficiency. The rich have a greater propensity to “hoard” – that is to accumulate large cash reserves which remain unspent and are therefore not available to stimulate activity so that the Keynesian multiplier effect is thereby much reduced. And when they do spend, it is often on arbitrary and capricious purposes – little wonder that “trickle down” is not supported by any evidence.
At the other end of the scale, why deprive the economy of the productive capacity of a large chunk of the population? Can it possibly make economic sense to relegate them to unemployment and minimum wages when they could be both working and spending to the benefit of the economy as a whole?
Can it make sense to consign them to a future where poor education, skills and health – all consequences of poverty – mean that they are more likely to become burdens rather than contributors?
The task for Labour and the left more generally is, in other words, not to abandon their vision of a better and more productive and efficient society, but to demonstrate more effectively how it is to be achieved. That will not happen on the basis of “we’ll be just as tough as the Tories, but do it with a smile.”
The whole point of an alternative strategy is that there is nothing alternative about it. It is a strategy that addresses our real, not imagined, problems – the need to rebuild manufacturing, the need to restore our competitiveness as a trading nation, the need to reclaim control from the banks over credit-creation and the macro-economy as a whole, the need to raise demand and get the economy moving, the need to recognise unemployment – not inflation – as the prime target of policy.
Nor is there any shortage of good ideas as to how these should be addressed. Look at the work of John Mills on improving competitiveness, of Michael Meacher on alternatives to austerity, of Richard Werner and George Edwards on investment credit-creation – and the growing debate among leading monetarist economists about the proper role of monetary policy.
Labour has not yet summoned up enough courage to strike out in these positive directions. It is not too late, but defeatism of the John Harris variety – look anywhere but where the real effort is needed, to make the economy function better than it does at present – is, sadly, not of much help.
Bryan Gould
7 April 2014
This article was published in the London Progressive Journal on 8 April.